


How You Get The Girl

by TheoMiller



Series: Not A Rom Com [4]
Category: Fantastic Four (2015)
Genre: Declarations Of Love, F/M, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-03 03:49:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5275421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You don't have relationships, Victor. You have obsessions and burnt bridges and nothing else."<br/>Remind me how it used to be / pictures in frames / of kisses on cheeks / and say you want me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How You Get The Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kyaku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyaku/gifts).



> YES. IT'S A RAINSOAKED DOORWAY DECLARATION OF LOVE. I HATE EVERYTHING INCLUDING MY OWN TROPEY ASS FANFIC FOR THIS TRASH SHIP.
> 
> Also this song wasn't on my 23 song long Suevictor mix for this 'verse but 1989 is basically a mix for this verse so. Here we are. I blame the mayor, though. I was fine with just two Taylor Swift songs being the official title tracks for part of this verse until her damn romcom mix. Three and counting now, folks.

"I'm kind of busy right now, Victor," says Sue.

Victor sits down across from her anyways. "I don't know anyone else who would help me with a... personal problem," he says, through clenched teeth.

Sue looks up from her laptop to give him an appropriately dubious look. "Reed spends most of his time trying to get you to confide your personal problems in him," she says. "Swallow your pride and ask him. I'm busy. Too busy for your ego."

"I can't ask Reed, it's about a relationship," says Victor.

Which. Okay. Reed isn't really the relationship guru. But - "You don't have relationships, Victor. You have obsessions and burnt bridges and nothing else."

"That's the problem."

Sue sets down her phone. Closes her laptop. "You want a relationship?" She can't quite decide which word to emphasize, so it comes out even mire incredulous than she intends.

"I met someone," he says.

He sounds miserable. But he looks - hopeful. She's actually kind of impressed that he's at a point where trying to a) ask for help and b) acknowledge his feelings isn't completely overwhelming hope with disgust.

"You met someone you like enough to pursue a relationship?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to need data, Victor."

He just scowls, so she decides to poke at it. Purely selfless, non mischievous reasons.

"Was it love at first sight?"

"I'm not deigning that with a response."

"Is she The One? Do you get butterflies? Try out her last name?"

Instead of snapping at her to shut up and be serious, he folds his arms.

"Whoa," she says. "It's pretty serious, then."

"Yes."

"Have you told her how you feel?"

" _No_."

Sue sighs. This is going to be headache inducing. "Why not?"

"She's angry at me."

"Why is she angry at you?" Prompts Sue.

Victor's silent. Primarily because he has yet to learn how to use his words. Well, at least, how to use the words "I don't know".

"Is it because she doesn't know how you feel?"

"...possibly."

"Have you tried _asking_ her about why she's angry?"

"I asked her family," he says sourly. "One laughed at me, one had no idea she was angry at me, and one told me to talk to her."

"So _talk to her_." Jesus. Sue is trying her best to remember that this is one of the smartest people she knows.

"What do I say?"

"Go to her place, bring flowers if she's a flowers kind of girl, knock on her door, and say you're sorry, you screwed up, and you don't want to hurt her. Tell her you want to be with her and you're willing to put the work in. Tell her anything that'll work, as long as you mean it."

"Her place? Oughtn't I go to her right away instead of waiting for her to go home?"

"She won't appreciate you making a scene at her workplace, or at school, or wherever she might be. Being in private will give both you and her freedom from social pressures of an audience."

"That's... logical."

"I know," says Sue. "And you know it's creepy that you know her schedule, right?"

Victor glares at her, but otherwise ignores the comment. "Flowers."

"Do you know her favourite color?"

"Yes."

"Go to a flower shop and ask a florist to make something with it."

Victor stares at her, and she ignores the heavy weight of his gaze and busies herself with opening her laptop back up. She pretends not to hear his muttered, thank you.

She tries even harder not to wish she was this girl of his.

-

Sue is starting to regret electing to stay in the dorms at Baxter. The tile floors and old windows made things chilly enough in the driving January rain without them blasting the industrial air conditioners in the hall. And of course she'd been too afraid of accusations of favouritism to get a room in the Southside dorms, even though she'd certainly earned one, since she'd personally drafted the plans to maximize their efficiency and had been instrumental in the fundraising efforts for the modernization that had made them worthy of a gold energy rating and a bunch of tax breaks, and raised their ratings as a student friendly school.

She's maybe a little bitter about this, but there's no one to be bitter towards but herself, since she'd chosen her accommodations.

And towards whoever's banging on her door while she drinks tea and bitches internally. This is her unwind time, dammit.

Sue throws open the door without checking the peephole, a true testament to how irrationally angry she is, and then she stops, the beginnings of a tirade dying on her tongue before she can start it at all.

Victor looks like a wet cat. His "I don't give a fuck" haircut is dripping way water onto his face, and it looks like he's been running his fingers through it anxiously, like he does when he's stress engineering, and he looks half pissed off, half tragic Greek hero, and 100% northern European pale, and he's shivering, because his stupid leather jacket doesn't have a real hoodie underneath, just the hood, so it's not warm, or particularly insulated, and only waterproof if he actually uses the damn hood. Which he clearly hasn't, because it's plastered to the back of the jacket. And clutched in his hand, the one not still raised from where he'd been knocking, is a bouquet of blue and red flowers.

"Did my advice not work?" She says, but she's numb, so she's only distantly aware it's her talking.

"I don't know yet," says Victor. "I haven't started my speech."

"Oh my god."

"I wasn't looking for this. I didn't want this. I wanted to build my machine in blessed silence, and never resurface from my work, because there was nothing else worth - worth anything. I certainly didn't want help from anyone. And I didn't want to want the only daughter of the man who'd given me a chance at seeing my life's work come to fruition. I thought, this is the worst thing I've ever felt. All that time waiting to feel something again, and the minute I found it, I wanted it gone."

"Victor -"

"Let me finish."

Sue nods.

"I fought you every step of the way, and then when you broke me down anyway, I - I waited for the end. And it came, because we were doomed from the start, and I left, and I holed up with my distractions, and I thought that that, that was even worse. Being alone after I'd been with you was far worse than being alone all my life. Because I knew what I'd been missing. It wasn't just my mother's deathbed ramblings about the life she'd wanted for me."

"Victor, I--"

"Don't, I'm almost done. I'm - I was wrong, again, you always prove me wrong, you always ruin me like this, until I met you I thought - this was worse. It's so much worse to look at you every day, these past six months. Because I know I ruined you too."

"Five years," says Sue. "You were gone five years, Victor. I didn't change my number. I stayed in the same dorm where you showed up and pushed your way in at three in the morning during finals week and rearranged my entire - I was here. The whole time."

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to explain why you became just another person who left me and never came back!"

"Because I was afraid!" Victor shouts, throwing his hands in the air and sprinkling water everywhere with the bouquet.

Sue steps back.

"No, fuck, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have yelled, I'm not. I'm not good at this, Susan! I don't know what I'm doing, and after twenty seven years of being the smartest person in any given room, that's a little fucking terrifying!"

"Victor."

"Susan, I'm - I'm leaving. Okay? I'm leaving. I'll see you at work."

" _Victor_."

He finally stops, looking at her like he's actually starting to realize what's going on, Jesus. Smartest person in the room, her ass.

"Call me Sue." Like you used to, she thinks.

Victor looks at her like she's sentenced him to death.

"Sue?"

"Yeah. It's a nickname. Something people close to me call me. You do know what a nickname is, don't you?"

He glances down at the soaked flowers, and then back up at her. "Can I come in?"

"That is why I stepped out of the way," she tells him. "Although when you learned enough manners to require an invitation is beyond me."

He steps across the threshold so slowly that she's very, very tempted to make a vampire joke. But he looks like he might spook if she breathes wrong. "I'm going to ruin you," she says, unapologetic. "But I'll fix you afterwards."

"Kintsugi," says Victor, and closes the door behind himself. It's uncanny, really. How easily they know what the other is thinking, in sudden bursts, while muddling through the dark on everything else about each other.

 

She can't look at him right now.

Sue owns a vase only because Johnny had made one once when they were children, but she does own a vase, so she sets about climbing onto the step stool, which is only a teensy bit humiliating, and unearthing it from the back of the cupboard above the dingy fridge that still has an equation scribbled on it where Victor had lost the dry erase marker and grabbed a sharpie in its place. She _may_ have had ulterior motives in keeping the crappy dorm.

The stems of the flowers, which are a very classy mixture of pale blues and a dark crimson, are bent and bruised from Victor's grip. They're nearly unblemished otherwise. She's running through flower prices at average retail price, already a ridiculous markup, plus convenience fee, plus the usual New York price hike, the luxury tax, all allowing for inflation since the last year of data she'd seen - Jesus. She's going to make him thriftier if it kills her.

"How did you know my favourite colours, exactly?"

"I asked Johnny."

"And he told you?"

"No, he laughed in my face. I had to sift through years of memories to establish a sufficiently large data pool to determine that blue and red were the two colours you favoured, in terms of a mode, discounting external variables like situations where there were more determining factors than colour---"

Sue pushes the footstool in front of him with her foot, climbs up on it, and kisses him soundly. "Pattern recognition," she says, clutching at the edges of his stupid, rain soaked jacket.

"I could show you the algorithm I used."

"Promises, promises," says Sue.

**Author's Note:**

> This one might get edited all to hell later. I'm not really awake enough to know if I'm happy with it but. Threw it together to get it out of my poor overworked head.


End file.
